Jack White
Jack White is Eyewitness News' Investigative Reporter and host of the public affairs show Newsmakers.
He's a Pulitzer Prize and Emmy award winning reporter who has worked at three newspapers, two television stations and has written for several magazines during his 30 year career.
Jack won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1974 during the Watergate scandal for his story that disclosed President Richard Nixon cheated on his 1971-72 income tax returns. As a direct result of the story, Nixon and his wife were ordered to pay the government $495,000 in back taxes. In confirming the accuracy of Jack's story, President Nixon told Jack's editor at a nationally televised news conference: "Congratulations, sir, on having such a lively staff."
The Emmy was awarded in 1992 for Jack's reporting on fugitive banker Joseph Mollicone who fled Rhode Island after embezzling an estimated $13 million from his small Providence bank. The embezzlement was widely viewed as one of the causes of the banking crisis that left half the state's residents without access to their money because it was locked up in closed banks and credit unions. Jack revealed that Mollicone had assumed a new identity and fled to Salt Lake City, Utah, just a few steps ahead of investigators.
In addition, Jack has been nominated for Emmy awards for his work as host of Newsmakers, his reporting on the Mafia and for a half-hour special that took viewers inside the cold, hard world of the Maximum Security unit at the Rhode Island state prison.
The Plunder Dome probe of corruption at Providence City Hall has been one of Jack's main assignments since the investigation broke in 1999. In addition to many exclusive stories about the probe, Jack was first with the news that Mayor Vincent "Buddy" Cianci and five others had been charged in a wide ranging racketeering indictment. When Cianci was asked at a news conference how he learned about his indictment, he replied: "I heard it from the press. I heard it from Jack White."
Jack began his career at the Newport Daily News in 1969. After about a year there, he was hired away by the Providence Journal-Evening Bulletin. He worked on the Journal's state staff for about two years before being named manager of the Journal's Newport Bureau.
He worked on special assignment for the Journal for more than a year in the early 1970s covering Navy cutbacks that devastated Rhode Island - cutbacks that saw scores of war ships moved out of Newport, that eliminated some 20,000 civilian jobs at the Naval Air Rework Facility at Quonset Point and saw the gradual scaling back of the Seabee base at Davisville.
Jack was named head of the Journal's Investigative Team in 1974. The team did comprehensive probes of municipal corruption, banking irregularities, the demise of thoroughbred horse racing, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and doctors who had become nothing more than drug dealers. The team won several United Press International and Associated Press awards.
Jack helped organize the first national organization for investigative reporters. It's called Investigative Reporters & Editors, Inc. (IRE). He was a member of the organization's founding board of directors.
Television called in 1979 and Jack answered by joining the I-Team at WBZ-TV in Boston. He worked there for just under two years doing reports on corruption in the Boston Police Department and reports on the Mafia. He left WBZ to write a book on organized crime in New England. The book was written, but never published.
Jack was a reporter and columnist for the Cape Cod Times from 1981 through 1984. When it became evident that he most enjoyed writing columns about Rhode Island - its beauty, its corrupt politicians and the Providence-based Patriarca Crime Family, he decided it was time to return to the Ocean State.
HE JOINED WPRI-TV in 1985. His first assignment was the second trial of socialite Claus vonBulow who was acquitted of trying to kill his heiress wife, Sunny vonBulow.
Jack and his wife, Beth, have four grown children and four grandsons.
Jack loves fly fishing, hockey, travel, reading (mystery and history), and roaming Cape Cod Bay in his boat in search of stripers and blue fish
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